


^7r 






Read at a meeting of the American Neurological Association, in New York, May , 
1898; Reprinted from the Journal of the Atnerican Medical Association, of August 
6, 1898, and from the IVew York Medical Journal^ 

Golf from a Neurological View-Point. 



By IRVING C. ROSSE, A. M., M. D., F. R. G. S., 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 

Ivate Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System, Georgetown Univer- 
sity ; Membre du Congres International d' Anthropologic 
Criminelle ; of the American Neurological Associa- 
.-^ tion ; the New York Medico-Legal Society ; 

^/^ . Vice-President International Medico- 

Legal Congress, etc., etc. 



Long before the Columbian rediscovery of America our hardy 
Caledonian ancestry amused themselves by playing the royal 
and ancient game which has been defined as " the putting of 
little balls into little holes with instruments very ill adapted to 
the purpose." In those days certain ascetic and lugubrious 
persons, like the sham-pious reformers of the present, who con- 
demn as sinful anything that makes people feel happy, cried 
down golf, football and other so-called unprofitable sports, 
which they prohibited by decree, the legislative blight being a 
canon of the old Scotch parliament against golf. 

It being difficult to extinguish strong instincts, people gave 
no heed to such prohibitions against the natural and wholesome 
promptings of the play impulse and manly pastimes of a 
vigorous race, and to-day we find a game with a long pedigree 
taken up and assimilated from Scotland and so fascinating as 
to have spread around the English-speaking world. 

Instead of dividing mankind, as some mathematicians do, 
into two classes, namely, those who have read analytical 
geometry and those who have not, it is more appropriate to 
divide them into those who play golf and those who do not, or 




m 



Ct V" 

as an enthusiastic devotee to golf might put it, those who are 
long drivers and those who are not. 

What was yesterday the fad of a few has to-day become the 
practice of many sorts and conditions of men who find in the 
exhilarating game of golf (which experts prefer to call a study) 
a means of hygiene and a sport of inestimable value. 

A short time since in a paper prepared for this Association 
" on the conservative value of the play impulse," I endeavored 
to point out the individual and philogenic good brought about 
by the exercise of the manly sports which bring together men 
and women of the leisure class at such places as the tennis 
court, the hunt, the meet, and the golf links. Since then the 
game of St. Andrews in Fifeshire has encircled the earth like 
the world-invading Campbells, and the descendants of a race 
to which Piper Findlater belongs take their amusement seri- 
ously at sea-side links or on grassy moorlands at a game than 
which none is a severe test of nerve or requires more stupid, 
dogged patience and harder work. 

Any golf player familiar with the niblick shot out of sand in 
front of a bunker cliff will, I am sure, recognize the cool judg- 
ment and prompt action required by a successful player who 
makes a good drive and avoids or extricates himself from awk- 
ward hazards, as well as the many advantages entailed thereby 
in the way of invigorating and healthy employment of the 
highest bodily activities. 

Doubtless from the sportsman's point of view and that of the 
hygienist the value of golf is quite apparent, but its therapeutic 
value, not so well established, is practically an untrodden field 
and in need of an exponent. 

In the capacity of physician and neurologist it is imposssible 
to familiarize one's self with the facts of the game in this rela- 
tion without seeing its many advantages and acknowledging 
its merits as beyond all praise. 

To the neurologist, who trusts to psychic, mechanical and 
hygienic influences rather than to drugs for treatment, the 
theme is replete with magnificent possibilities of prophylaxis 
and even of therapeutics. We have a royal road to physical 
exhilaration in a game th.at can be played all the year round, 



independently of atmospheric vicissitudes, during all the seven 
ages of man, by delicate young girls as well as by strong 
athletes, and even by decrepit old men whose declining powers 
do not admit of severe exertion. It combines exercise, pleasure 
and fresh air without that risk of injury to heart, lungs, or 
nervous system as is the case in certain other exercises in which 
there is high blood pressure and arterial tension. There is ab- 
solutely no danger attached to the game and consequently 
no accidents ensue. Unlike the bicycle, it is doubtful if such a 
thing as an accident insurance was ever paid for injury incurred 
at golf. Nor is the game contraindicated in heart lesions, 
arterial calcification, albuminuria, old age, childhood or certain 
hysterical conditions which would be aggravated by such exer- 
cise as bicyling, swimming, horse-back riding, or by mountain 
climbing. 

I may say that in all affections marked by slowing of oxida- 
tion or in those consequent upon intoxication by the products 
of organic disassimilation, the game of golf is to be recom- 
mended as the best method of bringing about a cure. 

The obesity and degeneration of middle age, when the biceps 
has diminished and one's energy is failing, may be helped by 
devotion to golf The further tendency of the exercise is to 
eliminate the so-called diatheses and thus do away with gout, 
lithaemia, headache, and dyspepsia ; while its hygienic and 
therapeutic consequences are admissible in cardiac and pul- 
monary affections. Although moderation is advisable under 
such circumstances, there can be no doubt of the benefit derived 
in some cases of cough, nervous asthma, and in aifections of the 
bladder and prostate ; but it is preeminently in functional ner- 
vous disease that our great Anglo-Saxon game is to be recom- 
mended both as prophylactic and curative. No exercise or 
recreation is better fitted for the mentally over-worked, the 
hysterical, the melancholic ; none helps to preserve the con- 
certed action of eye, brain, and muscle known as the psycho- 
logical moment ; none, perhaps with the exception of swim- 
ming, gives one so good an appetite ; there is not a more sov- 
ereign remedy for dyspepsia, and as to insomnia, such a thing 
scarcely exists among the devotees of golf. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



020 237 040 8 



Improvement in appetite and digestion have come under the- 
notice of nearly everyone connected with a golf club. Only 
two years ago the breezy air of the Newport Golf-Green caused 
such an improvement in this respect that the members of the 
club replaced a French by a negro cook, whose dishes were- 
considered more wholesome and better suited to a golfer's 

appetite. . 

In addition to the unconscious vigor of body and mmd im- 
parted by golf the social amenities arising therefrom are of un- 
questionable therapeutic value, since the genial influences of 
the game by expanding the ideas tend to promote the good fel- 
lowship that comes from diversion and sensuous amusement, 
and by oiling the wheels of life, so to speak, makes them go on 
with rattling glee. In these days of excessive drive, competi- 
tion and over-pressure, when undue waste of vital energy 
shows itself to the clinician in the shape of various neuropathic 
conditions and decayed nerve elements, the problem of averting 
or mitigating such mischief comes to us with much seriousness.. 
An oh-ious helD in the solution is the encouragement of all 
' innocent sports and recreations as a compensating factor m the 
phenomena of life. The condition applicable to the greater 
number is partly met by the present "boom "in a game that 
accurately reflects and expresses a great race and falls m with 
the spirit of our age of haste and objectivity. 

If there is one innocent recreation adapted more than another 
to all sorts and conditions of both men and women, but more 
especially to the gloaming of life when the mind needs an altera- 
tive it assuredly is to be found in the national game of Scotland. 



k 



^ 



Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive 
in 2011 witin funding from 
Tine Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/golffromneurologOOross 



^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



020 237 040 8 



HoUingra: Corp. 
pH8.5 



